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1. The Hybrid Rice program in India was launched in 1989, through a systematic, goal oriented and time bound network project with the financial assistance from Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

2. Technical support from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines and the FAO, Rome and additional financial support from the UNDP, ICAR and NATP and Barwale Foundation were the major contributing factors for the remarkable success of hybrid rice technology in India.

1. Rice breeding programme in India was started by Dr. G. P. Hector, the then Economic Botanist during 1911 in undivided Bengal with headquarters at Dacca (now in Bangladesh). Subsequently, in 1912, a crop specialist was appointed exclusively for rice in Madras Province.

1. Historians believe that while the indica variety of rice was first domesticated in the area covering the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas (i.e. north-eastern India), stretching through Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Southern China, the japonica variety was domesticated from wild rice in southern China which was introduced to India before the time of the Greeks. Chinese records of rice cultivation go back 4000 years.

1. Rice cultivation is the principal activity and source of income for millions of households around the globe, and several countries of Asia and Africa are highly dependent on rice as a source of foreign exchange earnings and government revenue.

2. Rice is the second largest produced cereal in the world. At the beginning of the 1990s, annual production was around 350 million tons and by the end of the century it had reached 410 million tons.

1. Chang (2000) made exhaustive review on the pattern for rice evolution was suggested as from perennial wild to annual wild and then to cultivated. Therefore, the evolution for O. sativa is O. rufipogon to O. nivara to O. sativa in Asia. In parallel, the evolution for O. glaberrima is O. longistaminata to O. barthii and then to O. glaberrima in Africa.

2. It is believed that rice originated in the marsh areas and spread toward the dry lands and hills. The domestication of rice, including such cultural practices as puddling and transplanting, might have first taken place in China.